A beer at sunrise then back on duty – the British pilot who made RAF history shooting down Iranian drones

A beer at sunrise then back on duty – the British pilot who made RAF history shooting down Iranian drones F-35 pilot based in Cyprus becomes first to destroy a target in combat – and celebrates with a single beer I n the clear skies above Jordan on Monday night, a British F-35 pilot made a small piece of history. Flying for four hours alongside two Typhoons, the radar picked up two Shahed drones . The squadron tactics instructor – whom the Guardian is not naming – hit the drones with two Asraam missiles. In doing so he became the first pilot of the Royal Air Force’s stealth fighter jet to destroy a target in combat. It was, he said, very high stakes. In those scenarios, it is easy to hit a friendly target by mistake. “There’s a lot of assets from America, from Israel that are going to and from area of operations. So I’m a little bit more concerned about identifying it first before taking any shots, but we had good time to do that between me and the Typhoons that were airborne at the time, to get that done.” There was no moment of celebration then, he said. The immediate priority was to turn the aircraft to make sure no more were heading their way. “You are kind of more concerned about making sure you’ve shot the right thing. Making sure you positioned the aircraft in the right places,” he said. “It’s not a euphoric sense of success. I just get out the way and get back on to doing the job again.” The pilot was flying from RAF Akrotiri, the British base in Cyprus that was hit by a drone on Sunday night. Military officials believe it was deployed – probably by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia in Lebanon – towards a hangar housing US spy planes, as part of the wide regional retaliations for the US-Israeli strikes on Iran. The drone had evaded defence systems on the base, probably because of its small size and low speed, and the pilot said that also made his interception particularly difficult. “Because they’re so small and difficult to detect, we don’t know if there...